Now Urban Airship wants to help, with a new set of tools for delivering images to mobile app users “38 to 58 percent faster than traditional methods through proprietary, mobile-optimized content delivery techniques.”

Urban Airship is one of the leading companies providing tools for mobile app developers, from plug-in code that helps your app send messages to users (via the iPhone’s Notification Center, for instance) to tools for tracking usage and figuring out how people are actually using your apps. Over time, the Portland-based company has turned into a major supplier of tools to mobile developers, and it claims to deliver billions of notifications to its customers’ customers each month.

The company’s new tools are not only faster at delivering bandwidth-gobbling images, they also make it easier for marketers to develop and deploy “rich app experiences” without calling on their dev teams.

Speedy response times are critical to mobile success, whether you’re talking about apps or mobile websites. Urban Airship cites an Akamai study that showed 40 percent of consumers will abandon a page if it takes more than three seconds to load, and an Aberdeen report that claims each second of load time reduces sales conversions by seven percent.

We’ve seen similar data from Keynote Systems, whose “Startup Shootout” — published here on VentureBeat for the past year — pits startups against one another in terms of their speed on desktop, tablet, and smartphone sites. Again and again, Keynote has found that startups are able to optimize their desktop sites effectively — but their mobile sites remain slow to load.